Child’s Play

Richard Williams, the world’s most successful tennis dad (Venus, Serena), was in the penthouse of a midtown hotel earlier this month, answering questions from aspiring Richard Williamses. Richard, how did your daughters get mentally tough? “Same way they got human tough,” he told one parent. “Running for their life! In the ghetto, no matter what color you are, you’re gonna run for your life.” When should I get my kid on the court? “I feel like I started too early—at four years, six months, and one day,” he said. Better, he now thought, to let kids grow up; a more sensible age to start serious training, he said, would be six years old.

Before his daughters left for Paris this week to compete in the French Open, Williams, who wore a striped polo buttoned at the neck and Nike sneakers with the laces untied, was in town to give a talk to the Hudson Union Society about his new memoir, “Black and White: The Way I See It.” He walks with a limp, the result of a childhood fight in which he was stabbed with a railroad spike, and sits with a hunch, the result of having recently turned seventy-two. “If I sit too long, I might fall,” he said, opting to stand rather than perch on a stool at the front of the room. Much of “Black and White” deals with Richard Williams’s life pre-Venus and Serena, especially his childhood, in Shreveport, Louisiana, a Ku Klux Klan stronghold, where, in addition to the railroad-spike incident, Williams said he was hit over the head with a baseball bat, a bottle, and a flashlight. Every attacker was white. “I had to do something, and what I wanted to do was kill people,” Williams told the crowd. “I had a war against the white race. But how in the hell can you have a war at eight years old?”

He tried. In various altercations, Williams stabbed a man in the neck with an ice pick, hit another with a soup bone, and, dressed in a Klan member’s hood, sneaked up on a white farmer, hit him with a stick, and ran off into the woods. Once, when several neighbors sicced their dogs on him, Williams pulled out a slingshot, which proved insufficient, so he grabbed a rifle and shot one of the dogs dead. He was arrested numerous times. “I decided I was gonna get the sheriff back,” Williams said, of one arrest. “So I set his house on fire.” The crowd gasped. “Yes, I did,” he went on. “I surrounded his wonderful house with kerosene.” After another booking, in Chicago, where he moved in the nineteen-sixties, Williams tracked down the arresting officer and told him, “Today, one of us will die.” (No one did.)

Eventually, Williams moved to California, where he took tennis lessons from a man named Old Whiskey, whom he paid in pints of booze, and says he wrote a seventy-eight-page plan for turning two yet to be conceived daughters into tennis stars. Once they were born, he put up signs in the family’s front yard to emphasize lessons about life (“Venus, You Must Take Control of Your Future”) and tennis (“Serena, You Must Learn to Use More Top Spin on the Ball”). Boyfriends were not allowed, and, to discourage any impulse toward early motherhood, Richard would rip the heads off of any dolls Venus brought home.

During the talk, Lakeisha Graham, Williams’s third wife, who is thirty-four, a year older than Venus, sat in the front row with Dylan, their twenty-two-month-old son. (Richard and Oracene Price, Venus and Serena’s mother, divorced in 2002, following allegations of domestic violence, which Williams denied. Rumors of strife, which the sisters typically dismiss or ignore, have followed the family ever since.) “There is nothing a human being cannot do if a human being believes in themselves,” Williams said. He was talking about Venus’s declaration, at twelve, that she would win Wimbledon five times—she has—but the thought reminded him of his most recent accomplishment, whom he grabbed from Graham. “At seventy years old, he was born,” Williams said, picking up Dylan, who had been snoring. “Of course, I went and got a DNA test. I wanted to make sure he was mine.”

Williams doesn’t want Dylan playing tennis. “With the things I know now, Venus and Serena wouldn’t have been there,” he said. “Look at Donald Sterling. . . . What sport do you think he played? Not one! And he makes enough to pay every single player.” Richard had wanted Serena and Venus to become millionaires; his goal for Dylan has three additional zeroes. “He’ll never be a billionaire in tennis,” he said.

What path to riches, then? “Gold,” Williams said. Gold? “Gold!” he repeated. “Gold mines are easy to get.” He has already done research on potential mine locations (Zimbabwe) and markets (“You can’t get China enough gold”). He also wants Dylan to study “all types of commodities,” in case he can’t find a profitable mine. Resource extraction seems easier than building another backhand. “Just two big sales and he’s set,” Williams said. “Then he can play tennis for the rest of his life.” ♦

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